I was first introduced to Carcassonne thanks to it being given away free of charge for a limited time on Xbox 360 to celebrate the 5th anniversary of Xbox Live. After a few plays and having grown accustomed to the rules (well, most of them) the game really began to grow on me, and I’ve since played the original board game. Within the last few days an iPhone version of the game has been released… and its pretty damn good!

If you’re unfamiliar with Carcassonne, Wikipedia provides a nice summary of how the game is played:

The game board is a medieval landscape built by the players as the game progresses. The game starts with a single terrain tile face up and 71 others shuffled face down for the players to draw from. On each turn a player draws a new terrain tile and places it adjacent to tiles that are already face up. The new tile must be placed in a way that extends features on the tiles it abuts: roads must connect to roads, fields to fields, and cities to cities.

After placing the new tile, the placing player may opt to station a follower piece on that tile. The follower can only be placed on the just-placed tile, and must be placed in a specific feature. A follower claims ownership of one terrain feature—road, field, city, or cloister—and may not be placed on a feature already claimed by another player’s follower. However, it is possible for terrain features to become shared after the further placement of tiles. For example, two field tiles which each have a follower can become connected into a single field by another terrain tile.

The game ends when the last tile has been placed. At that time all features (including fields) score points for the players with the most followers in them. The player with the most points wins the game.

The iPhone version of the game offers several modes of play. Normal mode is the original board game, which can be played either locally with up to 5 people (friends over Wi-fi or bluetooth or fairly intelligent AI CPU players) or online with friends or random players. Solitaire mode pits you alone against the game, with the goal of meeting a list of requirements. The original board game included several expansion packs – these aren’t present at the moment but may become available in future, presumably as purchasable downloadable content.

So far I’ve been predominantly playing Normal mode, both with CPU players and friends, and its rather good. Play is turn-based, meaning you can take your go and then exit the app. Push notifications can be enabled to notify you when your friend has made their move. The app is extremely polished, provides an in-game chat room, shows your friend’s current online status and provides an overview of what tiles are remaining. The game board can be zoomed in and out of easily using the usual pinch gestures and controls are easy and unobtrusive. Online games are ranked, assigning the player with an overall skill rating which increases or decreases with each win or loss respectively.

A couple of minor gripes are that the app runs a bit sluggish on an iPhone 3G or earlier (runs fine on 3GS onwards), and it should be easier to switch between games while on the go – at the minute this requires opening the options screen and pausing the game, which isn’t a very appropriately labeled option since it doesn’t pause the game at all, but rather takes you back to the menus. The game also tends to suck your battery a bit if you have it running for a while.

These problems do little to tarnish what is a great version of an addictive and fun casual game, joining Words With Friends as one of the must-have turn-based iPhone games, suitable even for those with a busy lifestyle. The app is currently available for the introductory price of £2.99 ($4.99), but will soon be priced at £5.99 ($9.99) so I recommend picking this up as soon as possible if you want to save some cash. Its well worth it.

Link: Official app site with trailer video

For a highly comprehensive review with tons of screenshots, check out this great post from ackmonduel over at boardgamegeek.com.